


wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving

by paperiuni



Series: Unwritten: Codas & Interludes [6]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Background Isabelle Lightwood, Background Jace Wayland, Bittersweet, Excellent Coping Skills, Immortality Issues (Shadowhunter Chronicles), M/M, Post-Episode: s3e10 Erchomai, Vignette, weird domesticity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 21:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14839079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Alec and Magnus wait, and survive, and process each in their way. A vignette about small mercies. (A coda for 3.10.)





	wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving

**Author's Note:**

> This will 100% get jossed, but fuck the police, here’s another bittersweet mid-season finale coda nobody asked for. There might be a second part.
> 
> (I know Clary lives, but the characters don’t. I figure they’ll at least consider the chance that she’s MIA rather than dead.)

*

Loss has a language. It is, Alec is finding out, spoken in silences.

Ever since Lilith's defeat, he seems to have a good part of his conversations without words. He can't pass Izzy without squeezing her arm, can't see his mother without hugging her too long. He spends hours and hours scouring the city with Jace, just being an extra pair of eyes, a steady support in a hopeless search. Jace refuses to mourn. Alec's not about to force him.

There's no body. No tangible evidence. Just a lack, an absence, the world bled of color.

Demon alerts taper off in the metro area. The Institute exhales for the first time in months. Alec signs off on leave requests, pushes time off on people he hasn't seen leave Ops in way too long. At least taking care of them is within his power.

Every day, when he's done, he makes his way to Brooklyn. The wards around the loft feel different, cool and prickling like a mint leaf pressed to the palate. Catarina's handiwork, until there's another solution.

Magnus is fine. That's his own word. The morning after Catarina's magic and the Silent Brothers' efforts had mended Alec's pierced lung, he woke up at Alec's bedside in the Institute infirmary and, after an aching, salt-tinged kiss, said, _My magic is gone_.

Alec held him, splinted wrist be damned, crushed him into a hug and cried some more. For Magnus's return, for the pulse of curdling despair from his parabatai, for the tears trapped under Izzy's lashes. Then, as details clicked and his fuzzy brain processed those first words from Magnus, he stopped. Slow horror replaced his relief.

It took four words to say. Magnus could as well have carved out his heart, or torn the intangible substance of his soul free from his self. That was how it sounded to Alec.

 _Don't say you're sorry,_ Magnus went on. _Biscuit paid a higher price_.

As if you could weigh that on a scale. As Shadowhunters go, Alec's lucky. He's buried fellow soldiers, peers and elders, but no family yet. He was too young to really grieve for his maternal grandmother, the only grandparent he ever met.

He's not ready to bury Clary. None of them are.

 _You can't compare like that,_ he tried to tell Magnus, that morning in the infirmary, because Clary was—gone, missing, presumed dead, and Magnus had given up his _magic_ and with it the thing that made him ageless. A life in the balance, either way. He'd done it for Alec's sake, for Jace's sake, for the safety of their city.

How do you ask forgiveness for that? How do you show gratitude? Which is the right thing to _do_?

For the time being, it seems to entail daily meals and nightly research. The kitchen has become a hub of their routine; cooking lets them share time and space while doing something concrete. So does the heap of books bought and borrowed that fills the study like a crumbling rampart.

 _I need to understand all this, Alexander,_ Magnus offered by way of explanation. _Clary's fate. What's become of me_.

They don't know what happened to Clary or Jonathan, beyond Simon's distraught testimony. They go over the site of her disappearance with warlock spells, werewolf senses, detection runes. Anything to keep up hope.

They don't know what will happen to every ward and ritual, charm and spell that Magnus has made over the years. Lorenzo Rey bars Magnus from the libraries of the Spiral Labyrinth, and Magnus barely stops Alec from tearing Rey a new one. The Institute depends on warlocks for its magical security. Angering the High Warlock is a sure-fire way to throw a wrench in those works. Alec knows.

He desperately wishes he didn't have to _care_. That he could fight some battle to victory, drain some part of this mire of troubles they're all swamped in.

The point is that they've called an armistice with loss, a grace period before they admit the inevitable.

So they study. Magnus spends hours on the phone with Catarina and various other old contacts in soft-voiced debate. Alec bangs his head against fine points of Latin grammar that he hasn't touched since he was fourteen. Sometimes Izzy joins them, because like Magnus, it calms her to sink her teeth into a problem. She doesn't offer to take samples or run tests, because it's tacitly understood that nothing they learn is to go anywhere near the Clave, and that includes the databases of the Institute. Not before they've exhausted other options, anyway.

It goes slowly. More people over the centuries have tried to achieve immortality than be rid of it. Still, Magnus collects any scrap of information he can find on either end of the conundrum. _Cover all the angles,_ he says, and sets another hand-scribed volume of 15th century Latin into Alec's hands.

Alec groans and gets to work.

Sometimes all they're good for—whether by two or three—is takeout and old movies and lying on the couch in a drowsy and possibly drunk pile of limbs. Grudgingly Alec accepts the necessity of those evenings, too. As long as they keep moving forward somehow, the armistice holds.

Other nights, he and Magnus flee into the early-winter city on long, winding walks that go nowhere. They take random lefts and rights at intersections and end up thawing their chilled faces in late-night coffee shops. Magnus lingers at landmarks whose stories only he knows, puts his hands on the sides of buildings and the trunks of old trees in Central Park and tells Alec, in spare words, who or what the spots remind him of.

As they come home at 2 AM, Magnus fumbles with the key at the building door until Alec reaches past him to jostle the door the way that makes the lock turn. They laugh it off in the stairway, halt on a landing, deep in each other's space. Alec's hand lands on Magnus's arm. Magnus smothers a rare chuckle into his shoulder.

When the stairway light times out, they keep kissing in the dark, at the slow and heady tempo of people who've decided they have all night. They don't talk while they stumble up to the loft. Permission is asked and given in the tug of fingers and slide of mouths. They make it to the couch or the bed and take refuge in each other's bodies. More often than not, Alec yields to Magnus's smallest signals, doesn't make him ask, does his utmost to be what he needs.

They don't talk about that, either.

Then there are the nights when Alec's phone lights with a message: _Not today. I'll see you tomorrow_. He texts back a _goodnight, I love you,_ and reverses his steps back to the Institute.

The pattern repeats itself, in variations, as days grow into tangled weeks. The lull in demonic activity persists. Alec counts his blessings.

Clary remains lost. Alec takes care to refer to her in the present tense, especially around Luke and Jace. He's loath to block himself from Jace for even an hour or two, after the unnatural silence of Jace's time under Lilith's control. Mostly he tries to keep Jace tethered to some semblance of normality: something to do, somewhere to be, somebody to check on him. Izzy and their mother help, as do, unexpectedly, Simon and Maia, Luke's second-in-command. She seems, in fact, to be in charge of the pack at present.

Alec didn't think the day would come when he'd be glad that Simon Lewis existed, but weirder things have happened. He's living them out right now. His warlock boyfriend hasn't quite turned mundane, but the difference might be academic.

Magnus's eyes remain the dark brown that was their first color, that he chose as the shade of his usual glamour. He still has the Sight, or something like it: they try it out, warlock glamours and rune glamours, and he picks up the subtle imperfections like no ordinary mortal could.

Alec is grateful for Magnus's penchant for doing certain things by hand, even when he didn't need to. It cushions, if only a bit, his moments of disorientation. It takes time to get from place to place. The trash won't teleport itself curbside on collection day. Bruises will linger and jabbing your finger into them by accident hurts. It's not that he's suddenly helpless; it's that he's not used to the world as immutable, or as changing at its own uncaring pace.

What do you do with a warlock without magic?

For Alec, the answer is simple. (Love him, with everything you have.)

For Magnus himself, it is not.

Alec thinks he and Catarina make the two people Magnus allows to see him with anything less than a flawless face, hair in place, nails lacquered in some dramatic dark hue even when the pads of his fingers are peppered with papercuts and rubbed-in ink smudges. To Alec, he looks the same as always, vivid, restless, impossibly beautiful. Not like somebody time can touch.

They fought over time, over a past Alec couldn't look at without flinching. Now they're fighting _for_ time. That's what keeps Alec coming back and squinting at the abysmal grammar of yet another occult volume until his brain hurts. The hope that there's a way to undo what Asmodeus did to Magnus, to stir his magic back to life or to restore it to him.

He can't be the cause of that loss. Magnus would correct him, but Magnus isn't in his head. That's only fair, since half the time Alec has no idea what Magnus is thinking.

 _I made that choice with my eyes open,_ Magnus said, holding Alec's good hand, sitting sideways on the edge of his bed in the infirmary. _Lilith had to be stopped_.

The tactician in Alec agrees. In war, you take the option you can see. They hadn't even known there was another option. Simon taking out Lilith with his Seelie-crafted mark won them the war, bitter as that victory turned out to be, but it doesn't diminish that Magnus did what was required. He found a solution.

Alec gave Simon his stele to give to Clary. If she's dead, he wants to think she went down wielding it.

Someday, Jace will have to stop looking. As will they all.

That knowledge sleeps under the revolutions of Alec's days, Institute business, training with Izzy, hunting with Jace, evenings with Magnus. He borrows Izzy's cookbook and leaves it on top of the desk in his bedroom so he'll remember it when he leaves.

His mother calls a little before he's done, and asks, without preamble, _Have you heard from Magnus?_

It takes a minute for alarm to set in, as she gives him the details. She was meeting Magnus for late lunch—Alec doesn't stop there, no matter that the prospect's still a little staggering—but he neither canceled nor showed up.

At the loft, after Alec's called four times and sent seven texts to a phone without reception on the way, everything is quiet. It looks downright tranquil in the cool late-afternoon sun. Last night's notes, Magnus's graceful cursive and Alec's narrow, ungainly hand competing for space on the sheets, are stacked on the coffee table. The throw pillows are dented where Alec sprawled, an open book on his face, deep into the small hours. There Magnus finally gave in and slumped dramatically on top of him, his cheek to Alec's chest, as if listening to his heart.

Maybe he had. But whose heart? Alec's, or his own?

There's a folded note laid on a pillow. _Alexander_ , it's addressed, in Magnus's script. The sentences fall like snow around his head as he reads through.

_You've done all you can for me, and I'm grateful. The others need you now, more than I do, and I need to understand this new reality I live in_. 

Alec thought that was what they were doing. Looking for solutions, for remedies. 

_So I'm going away for a while. You and Isabelle are welcome to the books, if they can be of any help in finding Biscuit. I have hope_. 

_I am sorry for the manner of my leaving_. There's that abrupt, almost archaic formality that sometimes peeks through in Magnus's phrasing. It hitches Alec's breath, constrains it into a shuddering pull of air. _I know you'll worry, but I've told you since the first: I'll be fine. It only takes time. How long, I'm not sure_. 

Alec reframes a host of little details from the past weeks in the space of a breath: Magnus wandering the city with him, revisiting beloved memories; Magnus talking to Maryse, who's suffered a similar loss, who might understand better than Alec can hope to; Magnus touching him with silent, shadowed tenderness, so his voice wouldn't betray him. 

Magnus was not looking for solutions. He was looking for explanations. For meaning, for reaffirmation, for the language to redefine himself now that he's irrevocably changed. 

_I only ask that you wait for me, Alexander, and, as you'd put it, stay on mission. If I learn anything on my own, I'll contact you_. 

_I am, and remain, yours_. 

Alec doesn't know how long he kneels there, staring at the curling _M_. that rounds off the note. His shoulders jerk, but the tears are clean as they come, hot and silent and somehow necessary. 

_I only ask that you wait for me_. If it's all he can do for Magnus, then he will. For as long as it takes. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from a somewhat suspect translation of a poem attributed to Rumi, but the authorship seems to be a matter of debate. It also sounded really good and apt.
> 
> Comments are love ♥
> 
> I am on [tumblr](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
